This is module three in the SMART Sales System sales training program. In this video, we will discuss how to leverage pain points to generate leads and sell more.
Focus on the Prospect’s Pain
I first learned about the concept of pain points at the midpoint of my career, when I was working as a salesperson at BMC Software. Before that, all the training I had received was primarily product training – this is what you sell, this is how it works, and so on.
But BMC brought in an external sales training company, and I found their training to be fascinating. They discussed many aspects of the psychology of selling, and one key concept they focused on was pain. And the angle was that, to sell a product, first identify the pain the prospect is experiencing, then introduce your product as the solution to their needs. I found this training incredibly interesting and could not wait to get back to my desk to start calling my prospects and talking about their pain.
Talking About Pain Is Not Easy
But when I got back to my desk after the training and started calling prospects, I figured out pretty quickly that it is not easy to get a prospect, especially a cold prospect, to open up and share their challenges and pain points. I knew where I wanted conversations to go, but it was not clear how to get them there.
And I actually believe this is where the training company and the company I was working for fell short. It was great that they taught me to talk about pain, but there is a gap remaining in how to do that. They did not teach what to say or ask to keep conversations centered on the topic of pain. We help fill that gap and make it clear what you need to say and ask to get conversations centered on the prospect’s pain, and that is what I will explain in this video.
Talk About the Pain You Fix
The first step is to have complete clarity around what we are trying to do. We want the prospect to talk about their challenges and pain points. But we do not want them to talk about any or all of their problems.
If you sell marketing services, you don’t want the prospect to talk about challenges they are having in the area of HR. This is why the questions of “What is your biggest challenge?” and “What keeps you up at night?” are not great.
You want the conversation and focus to be on the area where your product fits, and to uncover the pain points and challenges in that area.
Identify the Pain You Fix
If you want to improve your ability to uncover pain in the area where your product fits, you need clarity about the pain points your product or service can help solve. And that is what the next step in our sales message brainstorming process will help with: creating an optimized set of pain points to talk about for the product we are selling and the audience we are communicating with.
And one of the ways it can do that is by bringing back the value points we created in the last step and using them to create our optimized set of pain points. This is because, for each improvement our product delivers, there is an opposite problem that is either resolved, minimized, or avoided.
With that, we can look at each improvement and ask ourselves, “What is the opposite of that improvement?” or “What problem goes away or is avoided if we create that improvement?” This process will help us to create a good list of pain points that we can help with and should be looking for.
